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Last week, Republican U.S. House Speaker John Boehner appointed Dr. Robert George — co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the National Organization for Marriage [NOM] — to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). George’s two-year appointment that comes with a taxpayer-funded federal salary......NOM was disgraced earlier this week when internal documents revealed that the group engages in disrespectful and unsavory race-baiting tactics in its fight against marriage equality. The confidential memos asserted that NOM’s strategic goal is to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks” and “make opposition to gay marriage an identity marker” among young Latinos, “a badge of youth rebellion to conformist association to the bad side of ‘Anglo’ culture” and “a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.”

Last year, Speaker Boehner and House Republicans decided to defend DOMA themselves after President Obama’s Justice Department halted its defense, citing the law’s unconstitutionality. Boehner hired a team of private attorneys and committed to spend as much as $1.5 million in taxpayer dollars to defend the discriminatory measure in court.

Terry's pugnacious bigotry and anti-democratic fervor [as seen in this video] should forever remind us of the threat posed by the dominionist sector of the Religious Right -- including the implications of the widespread belief in the false narrative of American history called Christian Nationalism.

If it looks like a canard and quacks like a canard, it's a canard.* A favorite canard of the conservative Christian historical revisionist movement, in which David Barton is a major figure, includes the tale that Congress commissioned and printed bibles for distribution in the early years of the republic (it didn't). It's featured in Monumental, a film coming to over 500 theaters across the country on March 27, hosted by Kirk Cameron and in which he speaks with David Barton. Video below: Chris Rodda, author of Liars for Jesus, Vol. 1, cooks the canard for dinner.... (Skip to 3:00 to go directly to the segment mentioned.)

*Merriam-Webster: canard: a false or unfounded report or story; orig: French, literally, duck. (Not to be confused with a Cunard, which also floats but has buffets and is often named after a queen.)

An East African gay advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against a Massachusetts evangelist, alleging he has waged a decade-long campaign to persecute gays in Uganda.

The suit was filed in federal court in Springfield against minister Scott Lively under a statute that Sexual Ministries Uganda says allows non-citizens to file U.S. court actions for violations of international law.

Frank Mugisha, who heads the advocacy group, said it was singling out Lively for "helping spread propaganda and violence" against Uganda's gay people.

"We hope that he will be held accountable for what he did in Uganda," said Mugisha, who won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award last year. "We want to send out a clear message to him and to others."

Nate Phelps, estranged son of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church Pastor Fred Phelps, plans to speak at an atheist rally.

Never ones to miss a chance to picket, Westboro church supporters will protest the so-called Reason Rally, according to a news release from SecularStudents.org

"Nate Phelps brings a powerful voice and story to the rally," Reason Rally organizer David Silverman said in the release. "He shows us all that if you can come out as an atheist in that family, it's possible anywhere."

The younger Phelps is described on his website as an LGBT advocate who, "speaks out against the dangers of religion and child abuse."

The radical political right in America consists of various segments, including hate-groups and also anti-government militias. The Southern Poverty Law Center issued a new report on the marked growth of the radical right as a whole since 2008, but especially the explosive growth of the self-named Patriot movement and anti-government militias.

The radical right grew explosively in 2011, the third such dramatic expansion in as many years. The growth was fueled by superheated fears generated by economic dislocation, a proliferation of demonizing conspiracy theories, the changing racial makeup of America, and the prospect of four more years under a black president who many on the far right view as an enemy to their country.

The number of hate groups counted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) last year reached a total of 1,018, up slightly from the year before but continuing a trend of significant growth that is now more than a decade old

The report on organizations working to worsen the lives of gay Americans:

The LGBT community made significant advances in 2011.... But it was precisely these advances that seemed to set off a furious rage on the religious right, with renewed efforts to ban or repeal marriage equality and what seemed to be an intensification of anti-gay propaganda in certain quarters. American Family Association official Bryan Fischer, for instance, said that “gays are Nazis,” claimed that HIV does not cause AIDS but gay men do, and, for good measure, criticized black welfare recipients who “rut like animals”.... Overall, the number of anti-gay hate groups in the United States rose markedly, going from 17 in 2010 to 27 last year.

The report continues with its most consciouseness-raising findings:

The truly stunning growth came in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement — conspiracy-minded groups that see the federal government as their primary enemy......The swelling of the Patriot movement since that time has been astounding. From 149 groups in 2008, the number of Patriot organizations skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, shot up again in 2010 to 824, and then, last year, jumped to 1,274. That works out to a staggering 755% growth in the three years ending last Dec. 31. Last year’s total was more than 400 groups higher than the prior all-time high, in 1996.

An interesting development also noted is that while anti-immigrant groups about, a sub-set of them have not. After five years of sustained growth...vigilante anti-immigrant groups, which

the SPLC designates as "nativist extremist" groups, meaning organizations that go beyond normal political activism to harass individuals they suspect of being undocumented immigrants.... plummeted last year to 184 from 319 in 2010, a one-year drop of 42%. The decrease appears to be a product of bad press, internecine quarrels, and the co-optation of the immigration issue by state legislatures around the country.